Digital longevity is really important to me. That is, minimizing the friction in upgrading the interfaces for underlying files and data. This post is about how I've structured my virtual personal work and hobbies in that pursuit.

At Mechanism Capital, I come across countless investment opportunities in the incipient decentralized finance (DeFi) industry. When I do, I usually share the same reaction with my team: “it's another perp market” or “it’s just a uniswap fork”. Despite this abundance of market infrastructure, our reactions to this pattern likely stem from the observation that there are not many useful crypto assets to be traded. It’s like having the most luxurious, expansive supermarket imaginable with th...

Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are an absurd technological breakthrough, and people like @VitalikButerin have publicly commented that they're likely on par with blockchains in terms of ideological importance for this decade. The power of ZKPs can be generally split into two superpowers: privacy & compression. Both sides of this technology are incredibly important, but I want to focus on the compression superpower as it relates to the first line of this thread. How do ZKPs help power compre...

A settlement layer is where the final ledger of an asset lies. For physical goods & commodities, this definition is trivial, it’s just physics. For traditional, intangible financial assets, the ledger lies with some central authority. In the world of digital assets where the assets themselves are emergent from cryptonetworks, it’s not as straightforward. Bitcoin’s settlement layer is on the bitcoin network. ETH settles on Ethereum mainnet. USDC has multiple settlement layers across many smart...

TLDR; Crypto doesn’t matter until it does.“what if all the layer 1's and eth died tomorrow would anyone care?”I saw this question floated around in a group chat and was surprised by my kneejerk reaction: “of course people would care!” But there is plenty of truth in the demise of smart contract platforms not affecting the real world. Airplanes would continue flying, grocery stores would still sell food, businesses would keep conducting business, and people would keep living without a hic...

It’s exceedingly clear to me that I have a very chatty internal monologue. From the first signs of an awakening mind to the moments before sleep, there exists a flurry of loose-ended thought processes in my head that range from explaining technical concepts to coming up with my own “self-help” principles. In parallel, I believe there is a common narrative that has been growing over the years in my social circles: that writing is a powerful tool. In the age of Proof-of-Stake blockchains, priva...

I originally posted this analysis on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/BrianFakhoury/status/1485150532897591301I came across something interesting that the team behind Boba network is working on: https://github.com/omgnetwork/optimism-v2 TLDR: blockchains are *supposed* to be perfectly discrete state machines with no outside effects. But, if you're a rollup, perhaps fraud proofs can add some slack. The idea here is "hybrid compute" smart contracts -- everything functions normally, but co...

Context: I had written this as a note many months ago. On reflection, I think the term bribe token might better be reserved for the ongoing “Curve” wars and the rise of DeFi gauge bribes…🧙🏼‍♂️ Gaming the blockchain// SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT pragma solidity ^0.7.0; import "https://github.com/OpenZeppelin/openzeppelin-contracts/blob/v3.4.0-solc-0.7/contracts/token/ERC20/ERC20.sol"; contract BigBlockToken is ERC20("Big Block Gang", "BB") { fallback() external { require(block.gaslimit >= 2...

My understanding of digital ownership changed quite abruptly in 2021. I was never much of a gamer, but there were still points in my life where I sunk hundreds of hours into titles like Clash of Clans; never truly considering the existential risk of losing my “in-game” property that comes with the architecture of the internet pre-blockchain era. Elsewhere in the emerging metaverse, I was writing occasionally on web2 platforms, engaging in social networks, making memes, etc…. The common denomi...